But she did see him. Several months back, she was at the rear of the church late one afternoon. She had been about to close early, it had been so quiet, when she’d heard the bell. In the doorway, he was bending over, tapping something, grass cuttings, off the soles of his boots, and the late light threw shadows. Even when he stood upright and stared back at her, as she walked towards him, up the centre of the shop where the aisle between the pews once was, his figure still twig thin, she did not recognise him, nor he her. Her hair was longer than it had ever been, her figure fuller. Deep lines scored his face, his cheeks were stubbly, the chin sharp. His eyes seemed sunken, darker than ever. As the last of the afternoon light dropped on him he seemed both lucid and tenebrous. A devil blessed by the last touch of heaven. Who had been first to realise?
‘David.’ She could not remember the last time she had spoken his name aloud. He held out one arm and walked towards her, and she wondered how the years could drop away so quickly, like a satin gown that, untied, just slithered to the floor. By the time he touched her, or she touched him, all her rancour was underfoot – she kicked it back and stepped up to greet him. Before he had even said sorry she knew that she had always loved him, always would. And even as she smiled, and he smiled, and they both laughed, and embraced, holding back and staring into each other’s faces, then embracing again, as long-lost lovers do, she hated him for that.
In the tiny bathroom, really just a closed-off end of the rear porch, Lucille took down the frock she had hung there and slipped it over her shoulders. She gazed at herself in the mirror behind the door. The frock was a simple one, creamy pink silk. Her red gold hair, reaching to her waist, had frizzed considerably with the rain. Margaret poked her head around the door. She was starting to look worried.
‘Dad and Cassie are here. And someone’s just pulled up out the front, Aunty Lucy and Norman, I think. Thank god the rain seems to be letting up.’ She paused, not mentioning the obvious. ‘Can you open this?’ She held out a jar of Persian fetta, marinated. Lucille took it and turned away to deflect the unasked question. Just don’t, she said to herself, don’t.
Holding the jar out from her dress she twisted the lid. It didn’t budge. She turned the basin tap on and ran it under hot water for a few seconds. The lid loosened on the second try, coming away with a soft gulp of air. A few drops of green virgin olive oil speckled with pepper slid into the basin and Lucille stepped back by instinct, looked down, and sighed in relief. Her dress was unmarked.
‘Aren’t you going to wear some make-up?’
‘I have.’ She handed back the jar, wiped her hands and picked up the pink gloss she was applying to her lips.
‘And fix your hair? What about some of those decorated combs from Morocco? One on either side would look nice.’
But Lucille was already scooping it back up into a loose bunch, which she tied with a ribbon that matched that of the wedding cake knife.
‘This will do,’ she said. ‘I only need it to be out of the way.’
Holding the jar out before her with both hands, like it was a gift of the Magi, Margaret disappeared inside. Lucille felt the reproach of the deliberate action, the stiff straight back. Her arms dropped from her hair. She would not glance at her watch. Nor check her phone. And whatever was her mother thinking? The rain was not easing off at all. Only the sky seemed less grey.
She picked up the stockings and eased them on, then the low heels, in cream to match. Lucille had chosen the frock from the third dress shop she had entered, on a visit to the city specifically for the purpose. David had accompanied her, and they both began to feel ill less than an hour into the shopping expedition. They stood at the entrances to at least ten places, then stepped back knowing better. All the shops played music that made her spine shudder. The assistants were aged about twelve.
‘Only people under twenty-five buy clothes,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back.’
But David took her to a lane that featured boutique shops and stalls that spread into the cobbled road, with coffee and wine bars. He knew someone, a wife of a friend of a friend, who made individual garments and didn’t care about the youth trade. The woman had matched purples with reds, emerald greens with blacks and golds. The interior of the shop was like an Amazon forest, lush and bold. But at the back was a rack of dresses in softer colours. Lucille held one up. Shot silk, it was pink one way, silvery another, cream in a different light. It had a crossover front and reached to the calves which emphasised the curves her body had developed in recent years. As she zipped the side she felt that it was exactly the right dress and when she came out of the dressing room both David and the woman nodded.
‘I only finished that last week. I must have known you were coming,’ she said.
The day before, she had removed the dividing screens between the shop and the middle room, where there was a galley kitchen to one side, an open living area on the other, and between the middle room and the rear, where she slept. Now the whole church was open from front porch to back. A long high lozenge of cool air amid the pouring rain. Her personal belongings were tidied away, there were two thin lounges with cushions – red and purple, she was suddenly relieved to realise, not brown – and the bed was now a divan, covered in a striped Mexican blanket. Some of the guests were looking around pointedly. Exclaiming at the charm of the place, the ingeniousness of the living arrangements combined with her business. In small eddies they came, three here, five there, dumping their wet things on the porch and pretending the rain didn’t matter. Pretending to be sociable, casing around for people they’d not seen for years, relatives, old school mates. Really, they were all eyeing the door, and wondering why Lucille was waiting down there by the kitchen bench.
She felt her intestines tighten. The celebrant was already here, chatting to her father who was fixing him a whisky and soda. He was an out-of-work actor and children’s party juggler. He had another function later that afternoon, in a town an hour’s drive away, but had agreed as a favour to David, whom he knew somehow. Lucille forced herself into the knots of guests, with hellos and air kisses, accepted presents and pointed out where to hang coats, all the while his absence chewing at her stomach. Despite herself, she checked her phone. No message, no missed calls. A few mouthfuls of champagne helped for ten minutes. After that she began to feel queasy. Thanks to her parents, the food and drinks were plentiful. She took another of the champagne bottles from where her father had placed them in a wooden – brown – barrel of ice and took a wooden bowl of nuts to give her other hand something to do. They were brown too. Then there was a platter of babaganoush and teriyaki rice crackers. Julia was handing that around. Why couldn’t her mother have brought something colourful, cherry tomatoes or Sicilian olives?
Seated on one side of the former altar, Cassie was staring at the rafters playing a flaccid version of Pachelbel’s Canon, which she had first resisted. So clichéd, she had complained when they’d discussed the program the week before. But Lucille had not wanted music with too much personality. Cassie could keep her esoteric chamber music and be thankful that Lucille had at least not asked for a cello version of ‘The Wind Beneath My Wings’.
She circled around refilling glasses and chatting to the guests, spending thirty seconds, a minute, with each before moving on, all the while trying not to think and therefore thinking too hard on it. Standing over by the red gum counter, her great-aunt Lucy, for whom she was named, raised her eyebrows meaningfully. Lucille had hugged her and pecked Norman on the check when they’d arrived then artfully moved the conversation on. Aunty Lucy’s diabetes. Norman’s golf. How lovely it was they came so far south for the wedding. Her father was giving the celebrant a second whisky.
Another group arrived, recent friends, reading and drinking buddies from neighbouring towns, laughing and stamping their feet out on the porch, all of them, even the men, wearing colourful gumboots. Why hadn’t she thought of that? Her cream shoes were already feeling damp, soiled. (Why wasn’t he here?) She might change h
er shoes. She had to do something. (Why?)
‘Champagne and snacks that way,’ she pointed towards the trestle table where her father was standing, bottles aloft, head cocked to hear orders above the growing hum of conversation, the laughs, the plaintive call of the cello. She took their raincoats, umbrellas, and tossed them in a corner of the vestibule, where a puddle was forming. She turned her back on it and faced the room, looked all the way down past the counter, Aunty Lucy, the tables glowing with candles, the platform where Cassie was turning sheet music on her stand, a Navajo dream-catcher just inches from her head, her mother to one side still slicing something, a massive watermelon, bright pink – thank god – the whole length of her shop, her home. The rain would never stop.
She could do something. Margaret looked up as Lucille walked past, dodging sympathetic glances and offers of more drink, then she continued slicing, raising droplets as the knife slammed through the last of the watermelon. Lucille knelt at the bed. She whipped off the Mexican blanket, pulled it out from the wall and yanked the handle that turned it into a double bed. Underneath she had stored new white sheets and the doona. The week before she’d washed and dried the sheets outside, pressed them smooth with the steam iron and aired the doona of its ducky smell. She spread the bottom sheet out and drew it tight over the corners of the mattress. Margaret appeared at her side, knife dripping.
‘What are you doing?’ She glanced back at the guests collected at the front of the church like obedient sheep, trying to look like everything was normal. Wasn’t it?
‘Marking time.’ She brought the top sheet up and folded it back exactly twenty-five centimetres, as if this were rehearsed.
‘But the bed?’ Her mother glanced back again. ‘Everyone’s watching!’ She hissed this, like it was a dirty secret.
‘Yes,’ Lucille whispered back. ‘But I still need it made up. May as well do it while I wait.’
Her mother muttered something that could have been ‘crazy’.
‘Yes,’ Lucille whispered again, agreeing, whatever. They could all think her crazy. They all did anyway, deciding again to marry, at the age of forty-eight, a man who had already let her down.
As she rose from smoothing the doona it seemed to her that the light was lighter. By the time she pulled the slips onto the pillows and placed the gold brocade tablecloth across the foot of the doona – she had already decided it would do for a bedspread – she was sure. She looked out the window then. A break in the clouds to the west, an arch of light, a soft glow across the smooth white bed. She did not care what happened now. The guests could continue to drink, to party. Maybe the celebrant could juggle for them. She walked over and opened the back door of the church. Like all the windows and doors it was arched. Damp had made the timber warp and she tugged hard, releasing fine drops of water that settled on her hair and her dress. She felt like one of her mother’s African violets, which Margaret tended with a spray nozzle. Her hair would be like fairy floss by now. She patted it down, congratulated herself on not wasting time at the salon. If she’d had the henna treatment – brown, anyway – that the hairdresser had offered she might by now have been dripping dye onto her pearly dress.
The back porch was soaked, its wooden steps down to the yard black and slick. The view across the vacant land next to her was unimpeded all the way to the hills, where the sky was white and faintly glowing, like an opaque window grudgingly admitting the light. Perhaps her mother had been right. The clouds were definitely thinning, the rain might stop altogether. It was now drizzling, not pouring. Standing next to a potted palm were her zebra-striped gumboots. She kicked off her shoes and stepped into them, then went down the steps and followed the path until she reached the corner of the church. Without turning around she knew that someone had come to the back door, was watching her. Julia. Her mother. Aunty Lucy. She didn’t care.
He was bookish and musical, which was why she supposed she had fallen for him at eighteen. Now he could be considered foolish, tuning pianos for a living – as if anyone had pianos these days – and working in a second-hand bookshop, like an eternal student. She had visited it a couple of times. It was a converted barn on a property up the mountain that was once sliced by a highway but was now neglected due to a freeway bypass. The owners operated it from Melbourne, online orders and internet marketing, and David was left to wrap orders and usher the occasional buyer through the pallets of books from deceased estates, where they were allowed to forage for themselves. In the office was a display of glass-fronted cabinets housing nineteenth-century hardcovers, which from boredom he had organised by colour, and which for amusement she had once inspected. Blue, red and green. Boys’ Book of Adventures next to Trollope’s Barchester Towers. A row of black Bibles, missals and copy after copy of The Book of Common Prayer.
‘You should take one of these,’ he had said, and she’d thought she might, seeing as her little church had been stripped of all its books long before. She’d insisted on paying the five dollars, handing over the note with mock gravity.
‘Where will you put it?’
There was a barely used cash box in one of the office drawers, but instead David opened another copy of The Book of Common Prayer and placed the five-dollar note in the middle of the book, between the pages of the Form of Solemnisation of Matrimony. There the note remained, pressed against the sacred words, With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow, back with the remaining black volumes in the glass cabinet.
Where had she put her copy? Standing on the sloping vacant lot next to the church, she realised she needed to find it, urgently. She would find it and – what? Throw it in the bin? Make a fire and burn it? Take each page – there were many of them, thinner than tissue, thinner than skin – and peel them out, like layers of sunburn, and feed them to the flames. Page by page. Every one, beginning to end. From Concerning the Service of the Church, to the Articles of Religion, all thirty-fucking-nine of them. It would take time. The guests would leave. They could sit there and watch for all she cared, if it took hours. She would do it. But where had she placed it in all the cleaning and packing away?
She picked her way down the hill across the slick grass and walked up the path, back round the side of the church and up the steps, purpose putting boldness into her stride. Not bothering to kick off the gumboots, she walked through the arch of the open door, the guests arrayed along the church, and her family holding their heads at odd angles, trying, she knew, to watch the front door and yet not appear to be doing anything of the sort. People must be getting bored by now. There was no sign of the celebrant. She thought the book was in the sideboard drawer. Cassie was playing the opening of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons for the second time, her head tilted away from the cello, her feet shifting on the floor. Lucille would ask her father to get the pot-bellied stove going. He was holding champagne in one hand, red wine in another, asking, rather too loudly, if people required topping up. No, it was in a box up under the red gum counter. Aunty Lucy and Norman eyed the zebra boots as she stomped towards them. Pushing past them, conscious the party buzz behind her was now just an awkward hum, dozens of eyes on her, she ducked down behind the counter and was feeling around for the prayer book, it was only the size of a sandwich, when she heard her aunt’s throaty voice, ‘Lucille. Lucille.’ She found the book, stood up, conscious the church was now dead quiet. Across the vestibule, a shadow blocked the open front door.
She had never seen anyone so wet. He might have been standing under a waterfall for the past hour. His hair was a tight helmet, a black basin. His clothes clung to him like a grieving mother. Water trickled off his nose and chin and the puddle at his feet blossomed steadily, his figure reflecting before him in a sudden light that broke through the clouds in perverse splendour. The rain had finally stopped.
A sigh, of amazement, relief then joy, rushed from the guests. Glasses tinkled. Laughter erupted. Someone cheered. Cassie resumed playing Pachelbel’s Canon again, but much livelier
this time. Julia came up to her sister bearing towels.
Underneath the water David’s shirt was green. Lucille helped him peel it off, exposing his pale but delicately muscled torso, his fine fan of chest hair. The wedding guests obligingly looked away, poked their noses into their drinks. She loved that chest hair, which was not too abundant, not too sparse. Slicked wet, it reminded her of the first time they had made love a thousand years ago in the humidity of a January night. While he stripped away the rest of his clothes and emptied his boots, she found him a loose shirt and a pair of hemp drawstring trousers from the goods she’d packed away. Moccasins, a tooled leather belt. Everything brown.
‘I prefer blue, or green. But we’ll cope.’ His eyes seemed bluer, brighter from the pinched, damp cut of his face. Someone brought him a glass of red wine. His nose still dripped like a melting ice block, and as she leaned forward to kiss the chilly tip she noticed his hair was so wet the grey had disappeared. Suddenly she felt that love she’d felt when she was eighteen and he was awkward, sensitive and fallible. When she heard him playing piano scales from a room deep inside his house, as she waited at the front, and when he tripped on the hall runner as he opened the door, sorry he had not heard her knocking sooner. That creative awkwardness her parents had despised – why wasn’t he studying engineering or working in a bar, doing something useful? – but which trapped her heart.
How had they all forgotten there was no bus service out from the mountain on a Saturday afternoon? He’d waited there in the rain for half an hour before deciding to walk. After ten minutes his umbrella had turned to a skeleton then blown away. As he walked he passed no one, either coming or going. And of course, there had been no phone reception. The wind dropped but the rain increased. He had walked through water to get to their wedding. He was only an hour and a quarter late.
Letter to George Clooney Page 4